Tag Archives: Fairy Tales

This summer is the 160th anniversary of a famous vacation: from June 11th to July 13th, 1857, Hans Christian Andersen sojourned with Charles Dickens and his family, at their home in Gad’s Hill.

Dickens’s biographers tend to treat Andersen’s visit as something of a farce. Andersen was initially supposed to stay about a week, but he stayed five. Dickens’s daughter Kate thought him a “bony bore,” and reports that after Andersen left, Dickens pinned a note above a mirror that read, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!” From the Dickensian perspective, a patient but exasperated family put up with their Danish visitor’s eccentricities and poor English.

Kate Perugini (nee Dickens), who called Andersen a “bony bore.”

I’m working on a book chapter about Andersen, and find myself returning to this anecdote from another perspective. In a short volume published a half-century ago and subtitled “a friendship and its dissolution,” Elias Bredsdorff reprints a portion of Andersen’s diary, as well as his and Dickens’s correspondence (both to each other and with others). Andersen in these documents comes across as enamored with Dickens, desirous to stay in his company, where he was initially welcomed. He gradually became aware of the family’s annoyance, but only later; the first part of his visit went smoothly. Moreover, it was Dickens who, about ten days into Andersen’s visit, encouraged him to stay longer to see him perform in The Frozen Deep, a stage production to benefit the family of his friend Douglass Jerrold.

Andersen in 1846, just before his first visit to England.

Dickens and Andersen got along well the first time they met, in June 1847. Dickens had rented out his London house and was staying the summer in Kent, but traveled to London to attend a party at Lady Blessington’s, with the express purpose of meeting Andersen (20-21). A few weeks later Dickens invited Andersen to dine with the family, and when Andersen left England the next day, Dickens met him at the docks; he was the last person Andersen saw before he departed (26-7). By all accounts this first visit was a friendly one, and the two continued to correspond over the next few years. It was Dickens who, in 1856, first encouraged Andersen to return to England and to stay at his house (40). Andersen was moved by Dickens’s kindness, writing to his benefactor Jonas Collin, “as a boy I was always called Hans-Christian, but never Hans alone, and he writes, ‘Dear and worthy Hans!’ How such a beginning struck me!” (41). Based on their first meeting, their letters, and the warmth of Dickens’s introduction, Andersen surely expected to be welcomed into Dickens’s home.

Andersen mentions his struggle with English in both his letters and his diary. After his first day at Dickens’s house he wrote to Mrs. Ingeborg Drewsen, “it goes quite well with the language; I have of course to make some jumps, but we meet each other” (92). Two days later he recorded in his diary, “I talked a great deal this evening, and they understood me well” (52). After he had been in England a week, he wrote to his friend Henriette Wulff, “Him [Dickens] I understand the best as far as speaking goes, and now — exactly eight days since I came — he says that I am making surprising progress in speaking English” (94). Dickens praised Andersen’s English to his face, but his letters show something different. In early July, about two weeks after Andersen recorded Dickens’s praise, Dickens wrote that Andersen “speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that” (112).

Engraving of Dickens at Gad’s Hill, where Andersen visited him in 1857.

In the final weeks of his stay Andersen must have picked up on Dickens’s frustration, and his family’s growing irritation. After leaving England, he wrote to Dickens from Germany: “I realize that it cannot have been at all easy for the whole circle to have in its midst for weeks such a one as spoke English as badly as I,” he told him, “Yet how little I was allowed to feel it” (118). His diary and letters, however, make clear that he had felt it. From Paris, where he traveled directly after leaving Dickens, he wrote to Wulff, “In Dickens’s house Dickens was unquestionably the pearl; Mrs. Dickens tender-hearted, Mary, I think, was the one who came closest to her in kindness to me, and thus downwards” (106). Only days after leaving England he was sharing his awareness of the Dickens family’s annoyance, and his private diary shows that awareness had been developing for weeks. After the first performance of The Frozen Deep he attended a party at the Household Words office, and closed his diary entry for the day with a parenthetical, “Not at all in good humour really the whole evening” (80). Earlier that week he had dined with Dickens’s daughter and wife, along with her sister and mother: “little Kate sarcastic, and the aunt is certainly weary of me” (78), he wrote.

Cover of Wilkie Collins’s _The Frozen Deep_: Dickens encouraged Andersen to stay longer and see him perform the led role.

Andersen stayed well beyond the two weeks he had initially intended and by July it seems he had worn out his welcome. But it was Dickens who had encouraged him to extend the visit. On June 21st, when he had been staying with the Dickens family for about ten days, Andersen wrote in his diary, “Dickens begged me most charmingly not to go before I had seen the performance they were giving for Jerrold’s widow, said that he, his wife and daughters were so glad to have me with them; I was much moved” (60). This was just the sort of kindness that appealed to Andersen, always seeking the approval of those around him. And he must have recognized the burden on the family, for a week later, June 28th, he wrote in his diary that when he was asked how long he would stay, he replied, “Long for Mr. Dickens, short for me!” (70).

One can’t help but feel for Andersen, staying with a man he clearly admired, and who had encouraged him to extend his visit. Surely he can’t be blamed for the timing of his visit: not only was Dickens mourning his friend and busy with rehearsals for The Frozen Deep, but Little Dorritt was being panned by reviewers and he was about to bid adieu to his son Walter, who shortly thereafter left for India (where he would die a few years later). Also his marriage was unraveling — he would meet Ellen Ternan a few months later, and separate from his wife within a year. Despite all this Dickens himself maintained a friendly facade, but one might forgive his family for becoming irritated with their guest.

Perhaps had Andersen declined Dickens’s invitation to stay longer, and skipped The Frozen Deep, he wouldn’t be remembered as such a “bony bore.”

This year marks the sesquicentennial of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures inWonderland — or, as it’s more typically referred to, Alice in Wonderland. I’ve been thinking a lot about the history and reception of the Alice books lately. This week I was pondering the two titles, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice in Wonderland. The difference matters. Google searches are an index to the popular lexis, and Google Image searches for the two titles look really different. This is immediately visible in the categories Google suggests:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is on the right. The first four categories are book covers, characters, quotes, and movies. The most prominent image for “characters” is Jessie Wilcox Smith’s 1923 illustration, and the top two movie posters are for the forgettable 1972 film, which starred Michael Crawford as the White Rabbit. If we look past the categories, we see a mix of book covers and the Tenniel drawings (click the picture to enlarge it): Disney is recommended as a category, but doesn’t otherwise appear in the top images. Searching Alice in Wonderland, though, gives us something different (again, click the image to enlarge it):

The first two categories are “cast” and “Disney” (and the cast is not of 1972 film but of the 2010 Tim Burton one — produced by Disney). In this search “characters” pretty much means “characters as depicted in Disney’s 1951 cartoon,” an emphasis reflected in the costumes, too. Even the “drawings” category shows Disney’s, not Tenniel’s, and most of the images are from the Tim Burton film, with a smattering of Tenniel and of the 1951 cartoon.

Disney has pretty successfully appropriated Carroll’s text, and his adaptation arguably looms larger than Carroll’s in the popular imagination. Disney dominates the popular visuals for Alice in Wonderland, despite being essentially absent from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. So is Disney’s 1951 cartoon, Alice in Wonderland, responsible for the truncated title?

The short answer is no. Paramount’s 1933 film used the shortened title, and in their recent study of the publishing history of the Alice books, Zoe Jacques and Eugene Giddens note that the “diminutive version had circulated in the popular imagination almost since the original publication” (205). Their bibliography includes a 1903 film, Alice in Wonderland, though not until 1910 did a book use the truncation.

Just as Google’s search results give us some insight into the popular perception of the culture text, Google’s Ngram Viewer give us a broad historical picture. Ngrams chart the occurrence of words in the Google Books corpus. Here is the search for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from 1860 to 2008:

As is typically the case with ngrams, the trends are easily explained. We see a sharp rise beginning with the initial publication, when reviews would have begun, then negative slope until the mid-1870s, when Looking-Glass bumped Wonderland back into the spotlight, and a sharp spike in the late 1880s, corresponding to Henry Saville Clarke’s popular stage production. The second rise corresponds to the first centenary of the book but is more likely explained by the adoption of Carroll’s text, with its references to size- and mind-altering substances, by the counter-culture of the 1960s (think Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” or the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”).

Keeping in mind the difference in scale, here is the ngram for the truncated title:

The graph confirms Jacques and Giddens’s claim that the truncated title showed up pretty quickly. This graph differs from the above: it has a steadier rise, peaking in the mid-1930s, presumably with Paramount’s Alice in Wonderland (1933). The title got a slight bump during the war years, but the slope in the years following Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is negative, not picking up again until the 1960s. Disney’s film may now dominate the Google results for Alice in Wonderland, but the studio adopted rather than introduced the shortened title — and their cultural dominance doesn’t show up until later, at least not in the (admittedly limited) ngram results.

On Wednesday I head to Richmond for the Children’s Literature Association’s annual conference, and this post previews what I’ll be talking about.

2015 marks the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland. The Lewis Carroll Society of America is hosting a series of events, including an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York, and Harvard’s exhibition is viewable online. In the century and a half since its first publication, Carroll’s book has been adapted for television, theater, film, and even board games and soap. And of course, advertising. If you watched television in December, it was hard to miss this commercial:

Once you know the commercial is a riff on Alice, the tea party and the size-changing marshmallow fit the theme. But the Alice-ness is first established by the entry into the Target logo, the head-first dive after the White Rabbit (here replaced by Target’s canine mascot). That visual doesn’t allude to the book — Carroll doesn’t tell us the precise manner in which Alice enters Wonderland. Alice follows the rabbit and is “just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.” Then “In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” The illustrations aren’t much help. Tenniel’s illustrations show the rabbit checking his wrist-watch, and in the next image Alice is already down the rabbit-hole, opening the curtain to reveal the tiny door.

In Disney’s 1951 adaptation, though Alice enters the rabbit-hole head first. (You can see the scene on YouTube, if the clip hasn’t been taken down). That image has entered the public consciousness, and Target counts on shoppers to recognize it.

I take the phrase in my title, “Victorian vogue,” from Dianne Sadoff, who argues that we must consider “the production, distribution, and exhibition situations of films that adapt classic novels” . In other words, the context in which an adaptation is produced matters. Understanding an adaption requires more than just comparing it with the original. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland is no exception. Walt Disney’s interest in Alice started early: he produced “Alice’s Wonderland” in Kansas City, and brought it with him to Hollywood. He eventually produced 57 Alice cartoons, though they have little to do with Carroll’s story, beyond the title: mostly they’re a vehicle for the novelty of blending live action with animation. Disney also screen-tested Mary Pickford for a live-action Alice in the early 1930s, abandoning the project when he learned of Paramount’s competing film. But Disney secured the copyright for the Tenniel illustrations only after the release of Snow White in 1938 , and that’s when studio really got to work on Alice. (It’s plausible he hoped to get a film together by the 75th anniversary in 1940, though I haven’t seen anything particular to suggest that).

By the early 1940s, of course, the world had more important things to worry about. To understand the context in which Disney’s 1951 film was produced, we’d have to consider Disney’s films supporting the war effort, and how World War II changed the relationship between England and America (and consequently how an American film based on a much-loved English text would be received). And of course, we’d want to think about the role of the Alice books in American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Sadoff adapts her title from F. R. Leavis, who felt that Victorian novels were particularly “in vogue” in the 1940s. So that’s a lot of historical pressure affecting the production and reception of Disney’s film.

But this week I will look at a smaller, parallel history: the company’s story meetings and drafts of the film. Meeting notes and research reports from the archives show Disney’s storywriters responding to public perceptions of Alice in Wonderland and even considering biographical and scholarly works. Walt Disney was supposedly mystified by “the symbolic meanings people kept finding in The Three Little Pigs,” and responded with a phrase that’s quoted in most of his biographies: “we make the pictures and then let the professors tell us what they mean” . In that statement Disney seems dismissive of academics, of whom F. R. Leavis is a fine prototype (Leavis wrote one of my favorite academic sentences: “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad” . Such confidence). But the archives show something different – Disney did care what “the professors” said. As I will argue this week, storywriters responded to contemporary events and the cultural reception of Carroll’s Alice books, and knowing that fact should shift how we think about Disney’s adaptations.